The time has not yet come when the absorbing story can be told of the way in which our oversea supplies of meat have come to us during the war. The Board of Trade for obvious reasons does not yet release particulars of its imports, so that I am severely limited in my remarks on world supplies. Yet the general picture is clear and will perhaps serve as a background for some more detailed examination of our home supplies.

The annual output of home-produced meat in Great Britain before the war was some twenty-four million hundredweights, derived from an annual slaughter of roughly seventeen and a half million animals. The sale of these animals represented a return to the agricultural industry of approximately ninety-five million pounds sterling annually.

During the war an investigation has been carried out at the Low Temperature Research Station, Cambridge, on the food value of beef. The beef animals were specially selected by Dr. J. Hammond, F.R.S. (School of Agriculture, University of Cambridge), and by the Meat and Livestock Division of the Ministry of Food, as being representative of the beef industry as a whole. The work on steers and heifers has already been published (Callow 1944), and that on cows will follow shortly.

When the data from these investigations came to be analysed, it was found that sex, age and breed have only secondary effects on the food value of beef. The important factor is the stage of growth of the animal. In the present paper it is proposed to use this new approach to the old problem of the relation between grading on the one hand, and the food value and quality of beef on the other.